Control of Main Steam Pressure in Coal-Fired Power Plant Boilers by Fractional-Order Controller with Smith Predictor Structure for Delay Compensation

Abstract

In a thermal plant, the combustion system of the coal-fired boiler is a nonlinear time-varying system, which leads to undesired responses, if traditional proportional-integral-derivative controllers are utilized. Internal process delay is an important characteristic of the steam pressure in the boiler of coal-fired power plants, which affects the closed-loop dynamics. To compensate for this significant delay and reach the desired performance, a novel control strategy based on a combination of an optimal fractional-order proportional-integral-derivative (OFOPID) controller with a Smith predictor (SP) structure is suggested in this paper that achieves the desired control performance required for the optimal operation of the boiler. The simulation results of a coal-fired power plant boiler with the power of 300 MW show that the performance is improved considerably by having lower overshoot and lower rise and settling times, as well as a lower mean square error during the operation of the power plant Boiler.

KEYWORDS:

• Combustion system
• Delay compensation
• Fractional-order PID
• Internal model control
• Main steam pressure
• Smith predictor

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehdi Doostinia

Mehdi Doostinia was born in Ilam, Iran, in 1992. He received the BSc degree in electrical engineering from Technical and Vocational University, Tehran, Iran in 2014, and the MSc in electrical engineering, control systems and industrial automation at Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran in 2020. He has been a Member of IEEE and Iranian Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers (ISICE) since 2019. His research interests include distributed control and estimation, smart grid and microgrid control, event-based control and estimation, fractional order control, machine and reinforcement learning.

Mohammad T. H. Beheshti

Mohammad Taghi Hamidi Beheshti was born in Iran, in 1957. He received the BS Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, in 1984, and the MSc and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, USA, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Since 1995, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, as an associate professor. His current research interests include perturbed systems and communication networks. Dr Beheshti is a Member of IEEE, Control Engineering and Instrumentation Society, and Iranian Energy National Committee. Email: [email protected]

Masoud Babaei

Masoud Babaei received his BS degree in electrical engineering from the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in 2016, and his MS degree in control engineering from the Tarbiat Modares University in 2019. His research interests include the control engineering and control of microgrids. Email: [email protected]

Seyed Amir Alavi

Seyed Amir Alavi received the BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from Power and Water University of Technology (PWUT), Tehran, Iran, and Shahid Beheshti University (SBU), Tehran, Iran, in 2013 and 2017, respectively. He is currently pursuing the PhD degree in electronic engineering at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He has conducted a number of industrial projects on implementation of smart energy management services based on IoT solutions. As an embedded system designer, he has given consultancy to multiple international companies and projects in Iran and UK. His research interests include embedded control systems, microgrids, event-based control and signal processing, networked control systems, and wireless sensor networks. Email: [email protected]

Amin Ramezani

Amin Ramezani was born in Khuzestan, Iran, in 1979. He received his BSc in electrical engineering from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, in 2001, and the MSc in control systems from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2004 and PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2011. In 2012, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran, as a lecturer. His current research interests include fault tolerant control systems, model-based predictive control systems, stochastic control systems, and hybrid systems. Dr Ramezani has been a Member of IEEE since 2005 and a Member of Iranian Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (ISICE) since 2012. Email: [email protected]